African universities and globalisation

Abstract

The challenges that face African universities and intellectual communities are many and daunting. They are simultaneously internal and external, institutional and intellectual, paradigmatic and pedagogical, political and practical. Globalisation, as a process and a project of neo-liberalism, reinforces and recasts these challenges. This essay seeks to map out the dynamics and implications of globalisation for African universities, as well as the gender implications of these changes in terms of factors such as institutional access and the production of feminist scholarship. While women's access to universities has increased, the academic division of labour, which largely confines women to the humanities and social sciences and allows men to dominate the so-called "hard" sciences and "prestigious" professional fields, persists. Staff numbers and resources within the male-dominated disciplines have risen sharply as higher education institutions move frantically toward academic capitalism: market principles of university administration and accountability, pecuniary support and public service. The vocationalisation of universities has intensified the marginalisation of the humanities, which, in turn, has reinforced the appeal of "gender work" in the form of applied gender studies. Thus, the growing ideological dominance of neoliberalism, the discursive face of what is often understood as globalisation, has far-reaching implications for universities as sites of intellectual production that are both gendered and critical to the production of feminist knowledge. The first sections of this paper locate current trends in gender research and teaching in dominant eurocentric and androcentric globalising processes; towards the end of the paper, however, I speculate about the possibilities for transforming globalisation through feminist teaching and research focusing on African and Africa diaspora communities